British director Ridley Scott's new film Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe, has been selected to open the annual Cannes Film Festival on 12 May.Director Tim Burton will head the jury at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Last year's opening film was the hit animated film Up, which won two Oscars earlier this month.

Simon Cowell is to be honored with an International Emmy award in recognition of his television work, organizers in the US have announced.International Academy president Bruce Paisner said: "Simon Cowell is an entrepreneur and performer in equal measure. He has built an international empire, and in so doing has changed the face of television around the world."Congratulations, Simon!

The shooting of the film version of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit is set to begin in New Zealand in July.Actor Sir Ian McKellen, who reprises his Lord of the Rings role as Gandalf the Grey, revealed casting is taking place in LA, London and New York. Mexican-born film-maker Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) will direct the film and its proposed sequel.The films will be prequels to the Lord of the Rings trilogy directed by Oscar winner Peter Jackson. Isn't that exciting? What do you think?

Bloodhound SSC is being built to smash the world land speed record by topping 1,000mph (1,610km/h). Wow!Initial iterations of the car's aerodynamic shape produced dangerous amounts of lift at the vehicle's rear. But the latest modelling work indicates the team has finally found a stable configuration, allowing the project to push ahead with other design areas. It will be powered by a combination of a hybrid rocket and a jet engine from a Eurofighter-Typhoon. The wheels be designed to endure tremendous forces as Bloodhound races across the pan.Watch the amazing video here.

A nail dating from the time of Christ's crucifixion has been found at a remote fort believed to have once been a stronghold of the Knights Templar. The nail was found last summer in a decorated box. The nail was found together with three skeletons and three swords. One of the swords had the Knight Templar's cross inscribed on it. Bryn Walters, an archaeologist, said the iron nail's remarkable condition suggested it had been handed with extreme care, as if it was a relic.

Our planet is an amazing place. For example take a look at Blood Falls.This five-story, blood-red waterfall pours very slowly out of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys. Roughly 2 million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist without heat, light, or oxygen, and are essentially the definition of "primordial ooze." The trapped lake has very high salinity and is rich in iron, which gives the waterfall its red color. A fissure in the glacier allows the subglacial lake to flow out, forming the falls without contaminating the ecosystem within. Isn't it amazing how adaptive life can be?

The US space agency's (Nasa) Mini-Sar experiment found more than 40 small craters containing water-ice. Temperatures in some of these permanently darkened craters can drop as low as 25 Kelvin (-248C; -415F) - colder than the surface of Pluto - allowing water-ice to remain stable. Dr Paul Spudis, from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, estimated there was at least 600 million metric tonnes of water-ice held within these impact craters. The equivalent amount, expressed as rocket fuel, would be enough to launch one space shuttle per day for 2,200 years, he told journalists at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.